Violet light, pulsating at three-second intervals, was breaking over pink translucent rocks on the outermost planet. The grey sand scrunched under your space boots like hard-packed snow. But Blundell wasn’t looking at the rocks or the sand. He was staring down the long barrel of a heat thrower.
The man holding the thrower had the face of a compulsive killer, and Blundell knew that one twitch of the trigger would send half his chest up in a shimmer of blue smoke.
The man was yelling something unintelligible to him through the loud hailer built into his helmet, the sound getting tangled in the thick, gelatinous atmosphere of the planet. Blundell could only stand there, frozen, his mind a whirlpool of terror, feeling the sweat pricking and trickling on his back.
When a shout came from the fanged rocks over to his right, making the man with the thrower slew round in surprise, Blundell’s mind suddenly clicked back into focus. He could have seized the barrel of the thrower and disarmed his assailant—were it not that the travel-track drew him powerfully backwards away from the scene.
Blundell took out a crumpled handkerchief and dabbed the back of his neck and under his chin. He mopped his eyes. That had been a close call. Too close for comfort. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. The travel-track continued its gliding motion beneath his feet, drawing him steadily backwards.
Blundell always rode backwards on the travel-tracks. Everybody did nowadays. It was so much more restful that way: to feel oneself drawn effortlessly onwards and upwards through the tube of mild light, watching the displays on either side slipping past and receding into perspective.
Facing forwards was altogether less satisfactory. One spotted a tiny display in the distance, coming nearer and growing larger. Then, no sooner had it drawn level and one tried to get a good look at it, than the display whisked over one’s shoulder and vanished.
Fadng backwards, one really had a chance to get a good look, as the display slid slowly past and gradually receded into the distance.
The girl’s room seemed bare of those touches of femininity which one always looked for. Pink cloud cushions? Floating frilly auroras? There weren’t any. Instead just black and white. Black velvet curtains at the doorway. White fur flooring. White cloud couch. White lucent walls. Matt black ceiling.
Blundell watched the girl walk slowly towards him, looking straight into his eyes. She wore a loosely-tied knee-length jacket which swayed open at the front, revealing a pair of long shapely legs, slender but subtly curvaceous, sheathed in synthetic tights.
Blundell found himself staring, fascinated by the way the lustrous sheen, where the light caught the curves, rippled seductively along her thighs.
She was singing something—it sounded like a folk ballad with a flavour of unassuageable pathos—in an offbeat way. The girl’s face was cool, distant, austere, impersonal. A serene oval which seemed a stranger to any human emotion.
But looking closely, Blundell thought he found a sort of promise, a hint of anticipation, in the girl’s big dark eyes. Was it merely wishful thinking on his part?
Blundell would never know. For before the girl quite reached his outstretched arms, the moving travel-track had borne him remorselessly backwards out of reach …
Out came Blundell’s handkerchief again. Dab. Dab. Why did it have to be so hellish hot in these travel-ways? The air pressure seemed to be rising again.
Blundell looked listlessly round at the other passengers in the crowded shaft through which they were all travelling. The faces of most people had a glazed look. It took a pretty potent display to shake them out of their total apathy. The blank faces seemed mindless. No one spoke to anyone else.
Blundell glanced up at the cylindrical barrel-vault of the ceiling, its curving featureless surface softly suffused with white light. It had a hypnotic, soporific effect if you looked at it too long. But there were always the displays, if you wanted distraction. And who didn’t?
The displays lined the walls of the shaft at regular intervals. Each display was a complete scene, a complete world in itself. They were moving, 3-dimensional, stereophonic. Fully coloured and very vivid.
You could excuse people who were riding a really long travel-track like this one, if they gave all their attention to the displays.
The long line of lights in the ceiling came and went, illuminating the curving vault with pools of radiance. It gave one a peaceful feeling to watch the lights sailing past. But most people preferred to stare at the displays.
You got a bigger kick from the displays.
Cut off there, in the intermittently illuminated tube, the mind became bored by simply watching the blank ceiling, or the equally blank faces of the other passengers. In its boredom, the mind was grateful for anything to occupy it—anything at all. And so the displays came in useful.
It was all right provided you remembered that the displays were not real. Only the travel-way was real.
Underseas profound green gloom, suffused by the glow from countless phosphorescent plankton. Probing forward with their helmet beams, the underseas exploration team swam slowly along in formation, enclosed in their streamlined transparent bubbles, exhaling rhythmically.
Blundell leaned forward as he felt himself moving along beside a member of the team, through the shadowy corridors of dark water. Slowly, cautiously, feeling their way ahead.
They found themselves amid an immense shoal of fish, which turned and flashed silvery undersides, darting away. Thousands of tiny blips crowded their laser search screens like a snowstorm—obscuring the other, bigger signals.
The school of giant sawfish came in fast, puncturing the bubbles of the leading three explorers before any defensive reaction was possible. It would have been Blundell’s turn next…
At one stage Blundell was developing a theory that there was a definite sequence in the displays. Was it three unpleasant followed by two pleasant followed by one unpleasant and two pleasant again—repeating? If it were, one would be able to know, approximately, what was coming next. But the theory broke down after a few sequences, and Blundell was forced to fall back on the idea that the sequence was completely random in character.
So you just had to take what was coming, letting each display flick suddenly over your shoulder into the field of vision. Grisly or gay, shocking or sentimental, you had it coming to you.
With so many people crowded into a narrow tube, the atmosphere in the travel-way shaft was more than somewhat oppressive. There wasn’t much room to move. It was not surprising that there were constant irritations of one sort or another.
The man next to Blundell kept nudging him semi-accidentally with his elbow. Blundell glanced surreptitiously sideways.
It wasn’t a good idea to engage anyone in conversation. That way, you opened up a relationship, you started something you couldn’t stop.
You might find yourself talking, inescapably, to an obsessed lunatic. Or, almost as bad, a garrulous mindless bore. Blundell was convinced that many of the people who rode the travel-ways were, in fact, on parole. Walking cases from some psychiatric institution.
The man next to him seemed to spend most of his time looking sideways, away from Blundell. So by turning his head slightly and swivelling his eyes painfully in their sockets, Blundell was able to get a somewhat distorted, out of focus impression of the man, without seeming to be studying him too closely. The man had greying hair. Closecropped. Square head. And square heavy jaw.
jdhBlundell felt he knew the type well. He tended to dislike specimens of it on sight. An entirely different breed of men, surely. Sort of sub-species? Definitely sub. Thickskinned. Prod you in the ribs with an umbrella as soon as look at you. Or step backwards on to your toe, and never apologise.
Oh no, they never apologised. You just had to swallow your anger, rub the toecap of your shoe on the back of your trouser leg, and forget the whole incident as quickly as possible.
Another display swung into view as the travel-track continued its slow, remorseless march upwards.
Wow, that was a risqué one, thought Blundell.
Some of the displays, nowadays, were undoubtedly rather salacious by most people’s standards. Those lissom girls strolling around clad only in a few wispy puffs of C02 vapour. Or taking a languorous bath in a transparent tub full of flashing sapphire water. Some of the newest displays were definitely sailing close to the wind. Of course the aim was basically admirable: to take one’s mind off the otherwise insane boredom of the ride.
How did one let oneself in for this sort of thing, anyway? Why did one get on these incredibly tedious and long-drawn-out ways in the first place?
It was an interesting question.
The trouble was that, in the course of the journey, one tended to forget what it was all about, and where one was going. Blundell strained his eyes towards the start of the travel-way, down there at the bottom of the tunnel. But the perspectives just stretched downwards towards an unresolvable point in the remote distance. Like a perfectly straight roadway, appearing to converge in a point on the horizon.
Blundell racked his brains. The memory of the moment when he got aboard the travel-way was beginning to fade. He tried to visualise it, tried to bring back into consciousness the echo of what he had said when he asked for a ticket. What was his destination?
Well, what was it?
With a kind of panic, he fumbled in his pocket for the ticket. For several agonised moments, his ticket pocket seemed empty. Frantically, his fingers combed the inside of the pocket, while through his numbed brain flashed visions of himself hauled up on a summons. After a heart-stopping interval, his rigid, nervous fingers closed on the scrap of green plastic.
He pulled it out and peered closely at it by the intermittent glow from the ceiling. It was no use. The ticket had been badly printed by the machine, and was completely illegible.
The nightmarish thought came to him that he was on the wrong track. Panic surged up in him again, and he looked around wildly. He had to get off. He lurched sideways against the guard rail in an agony of mind.
“Steady on mate,” said the heavy-jowled man. His voice carried a rather surprising note of genuine concern. “You not feeling too well?”
Blundell looked up at him shyly. “I think it must be the heat. Terribly close in here tonight.”
“Well, you can’t open the windows.” The man guffawed loudly at his own joke, and hit Blundell on the shoulder-blade. He would surely have succeeded in knocking Blundell over, if such a thing had been possible on the densely crowded travel-way.
Blundell swallowed hard. He snatched a quick glance at the man, to see if he looked sane. Then said quietly: “Do you mind telling me where this travel-track is going?”
“Going?” roared the man. “Going! Good grief, mate.”
“I mean, our destination?” Blundell ventured.
“Destination? That’s rich.” The man looked at him with an expression of increased concern. “Don’t tell me you do your nut with airy-fairy stuff like that. Just ride along with it, mate, the same as we all do. Let it ride.”
Blundell mumbled his thanks. He decided the safest course was to pretend he was satisfied with his answer. He nodded and looked at his shoes. Perhaps if he didn’t reply to the man for a few minutes, the conversation would break off right there. Eventually they could forget the whole episode.
Later they would be able to look at each other again with blank fish eyes, and pretend that they had never spoken.
Blundell’s eye fell on the girl standing on the section of track directly in front of him. He had been surreptitiously eyeing her at odd moments, admiring the shape of her ears.
But when she turned and glanced sideways at a display, he caught a glimpse of a coldly uncompromising profile. She wore a black leather jacket and looked as if she would lock him in a judo hold as soon as look at him. Blundell regretfully dismissed from his mind any idea of speaking to her.
So there was nothing for it but to turn his attention back to the displays. The displays were always there. And it cost no particular effort to look at them.
Far from it. Brilliantly coloured, crisply sonic, they compelled and focussed the attention.
But somehow the displays, for all their stridency and seductiveness, did not seem to be working for him any more. They no longer held his interest properly.
Waves of heat flowed over his head. In the oppression of the bright tunnel, he began to feel that he was getting into the grip of illusions. Surely the girl in front of him looked several inches taller than she should be?
Blundell considered the problem dispassionately for a few moments, puzzling out its implications.
That could only mean one thing…
Blundell fought desperately against the idea, refusing to admit it to his mind. But it was no use.
If the girl looked taller than him, the travel-way must have tilted and was now going downwards. Boring deeper and deeper into the earth.
Down, down down!
Blundell swallowed hard, twice, but his throat was desert dry. Dimensions of oblivion seized his mind, receding like shadowy Chinese cubes, one inside the other, to the final zero.
He’d heard whispers of these travel-ways, boring interminably deeper into the earth’s crust. He’d not taken the rumour seriously until this moment.
After all, they had to do something with the monstrously multiplying population. People, more and more people, were choking the surface with their swarming ant-heaps. Piled up in towering termite-hills of skyscrapers, storey on storey.
So why not… bury them?
In the waves of heat, Blundell felt himself going icy cold. Of course. That would account for the increasing heat. And what test was there, whether the travel-way was slowly rising as he had first thought, or…?
Plunging.
The glowing ceiling swam past. In a swirling delirium, Blundell wrestled with his sense of the vertical. What was true vertical? How could one hope to tell? The only reference points were supplied by the displays… and it would be only too easy for unscrupulous operators to twist them just a little out of true…
From somewhere in his squirming guts, Blundell felt overmastering panic rising in him. Coiling upwards. It reached his throat and tensed the tendons to a soundless scream. His writhing hands curved inwards like the claws of a bird of prey. To go down…
There was a sudden juddering, a jerking, and Blundell had to grasp the moving handrail to prevent himself from falling over. Everyone had to do the same. Strange little noises, little curses, came from everyone’s throat, making a confused burble of sound.
The travel-track had stopped. Stopped dead.
After the first responses of surprise (but a travel-way never stopped!) the first ripple of confused movement, a complete silence descended. Complete stillness.
Everyone strove to avoid catching another person’s eye. The aim always, in these crises, was to pretend that the situation was normal. Some small technical fault. Be put right in a few moments. Meanwhile keep calm.
But Blundell felt the terrifying claustrophobia squeezing his head like the pressure of a hundred atmospheres.
Suppose it wasn’t a small technical fault? Suppose it was deliberate? They could be boxed up. Sealed in. Anything.
This can’t happen, thought Blundelll. It is too much. Too insane. This can’t be happening to me. But it was. It was happening, all right.
Please, thought Blundell. Please get the way moving again. Soon. Very soon.
He looked again at the heavy-jowled man next to him, but the man had the glassy, fish-eye stare of someone who won’t be drawn.
Everyone was the same. Blundell looked round desperately this way and that.
Everyone had the look of mindless zombies. Utterly mindless. Perhaps, thought Blundell wildly, these creatures are all androids and I am the only human person left alive.
It was going to be a very long…
But wait!
With almost imperceptible sliding, without a tremor, the track was moving again. Infinitely slowly at first. Then gradually building up speed until it reached its normal slow walking pace.
Sphew! That was better. Moving!
Blundell breathed again. He felt almost joyful. That was much better.
But wasn’t there something odd? A hint of something unusual in the way it moved?
Then Blundell saw.
Of course!
A simple illusion. A trick. It would fool a child. It would fool most people. But it wouldn’t fool Blundell.
No it certainly wouldn’t fool Blundell. He saw!
The displays moved. The lights moved. On belts. But the travel-track stayed still!
Blundell screamed. He fought insanely, he shouldered people aside, he writhed through the solid mass of bodies. Screaming.
Blundell managed to get all of three yards. Then he disappeared under a pile of elbowing, kicking, shouting, cursing bodies.
The girl in the black leather jacket turned round to look. She caught the heavy-jowled man’s eye.
The man noticed her and twisted his mouth in a sort of sickly smile. “Just another of those poor nut cases. You’d be surprised how many of them there are about, these days.”
The girl curled her elegant nostrils. She looked the heavy-jowled man up and down, and decided he was too big to lock in a judo hold.